Natalia Vitela/Reform Agency
Wednesday, March 15, 2023 | 16:11
Mexico City.- Given the potential risk that fentanyl consumption could become an epidemic in the country, as is the case in the United States, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked the health authorities to analyze the possibilities of restricting this substance for medical use and looking for substitutes. , informed the undersecretary Hugo López Gatell.
Fentanyl is an opioid medication synthetically derived from morphine that is representing a serious public health problem in terms of additions at the population level.
The United States is one of the countries that has the greatest burden of this problem and in Mexico there is a potential risk that it could become an epidemic problem, which at the moment it is not.
“President (Andrés Manuel) López Obrador has asked us about the need to carry out a careful, precise technical analysis, with a social dimension, about what could be the possibilities of restricting fentanyl to find substitutes,” said López Gatell.
He said that the president’s instruction and the focus of his initiative is to carry out the corresponding analysis and in an expedited manner so that any decision at the time it is made is correctly founded and does not cause difficulties in the transition to a new model.
Asked if the prohibition of fentanyl for medical use could solve the trafficking and consumption of this drug, he said that when faced with a complex problem there is no single solution, and everything is an important contribution.
“In this case, what we need are firm decisions, but also visionaries; not staying with the basics, but thinking beyond.
“That is what Mexico is proposing in the face of this epidemic; having much more anticipatory thinking than is conventional and is already done in drug policies in other parts of the world.”
